Review-A-Day

"Thirteen Moons [is] the best evidence yet that somewhere between one page and 400, a lot can go wrong....Plodding through Thirteen Moons, one admires its scope and verisimilitude. But this tale is meant to be an elegy — both for a woman and an epoch of history. And in the end, you probably won't miss either. You'll mourn only that bygone era when reward and result bore a closer correlation." Noah Oppenheim, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons is the story of one man's remarkable life, spanning a century of relentless change. At the age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent on a journey through the wilderness to the edge of the Cherokee Nation, the uncharted white space on the map. Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that ultimately forge Will's character. All the while, his love of Claire, the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful Featherstone, will forever rule Will's heart.

In a distinct voice filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion. As he comes to realize, When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time.

Will Cooper, in the hands of Charles Frazier, becomes a classic American soul: a man devoted to a place and its people, a woman, and a way of life, all of which are forever just beyond his reach. Thirteen Moons takes us from the uncharted wilderness of an unspoiled continent, across the South, up and down the Mississippi, and to the urban clamor of a raw Washington City. Throughout, Will is swept along as the wild beauty of the nineteenth century gives way to the telephones, automobiles, and encroaching railways of the twentieth. Steeped in history, rich in insight, and filled with moments of sudden beauty, Thirteen Moons is an unforgettable work of fiction by an American master.

Review:

"When Frazier's debut Cold Mountain blossomed into a National Book Award–winning bestseller with four million copies in print, expectations for the follow-up rose almost immediately. A decade later, the good news is that Frazier's storytelling prowess doesn't falter in this sophomore effort, a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. The story takes place mostly before the Civil War this time, and it is epic in scope. With pristine prose that's often wry, Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. In a departure from Cold Mountain's Inman, Will Cooper narrates his own story in retrospect, beginning with his days as an orphaned, literate 'bound boy' who is dispatched to run a musty trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation. Nearly nine mesmerizing decades later, Will is an eccentric elder of great accomplishments and gargantuan failures, perched cantankerously on his front porch taking potshots at passenger trains rumbling across his property (he owns 'quite a few' shares of the railroad). Over the years, Will — modeled very loosely, Frazier acknowledges, on real-life frontiersman William Holland Thomas — becomes a prosperous merchant, a self-taught lawyer and a state senator; he's adopted by a Cherokee elder and later leads the clan as a white Indian chief; he bears terrible witness to the 1838–1839 Trail of Tears; a quarter-century later, he goes to battle for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, leading a mostly Indian force with a 'legion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerks' as officers; as time passes, his life intersects with such figures as Davy Crockett, Sen. John C. Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, Will fritters away a fortune through wanderlust, neglect and unquenched longing for his one true love, Claire, a girl he won in a card game when they were both 12, wooed for two erotic summers in his teen years and found again several decades later. In the novel's wistful coda, recalling Claire's voice inflicts 'flesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusive' — a voice that an uncertain old Will hears in the static hiss when he answers his newfangled phone in the book's opening pages. The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narrative's true heart." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"Charles Frazier is an intelligent, occasionally witty author who writes incredibly long-winded, sentimental, soporific novels. His first, 'Cold Mountain,' published nine years ago, was the most unlikely best-seller since 'Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All' (1989), by his fellow North Carolinian Allan Gurganus, and the most improbable National Book Award winner since John O'Hara's 'Ten North... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) Frederick' half a century ago. Now Frazier weighs in with 'Thirteen Moons,' which manages to be even longer and even duller than 'Cold Mountain.' No doubt it too will be a huge best-seller.

That Frazier's success parallels Gurganus' is purely coincidental, but it's just about impossible not to remark upon the oddness of the coincidence. As a rule, the American book-buying public has only a limited appetite for Southern-fried fiction, yet Frazier and Gurganus somehow have tapped into it. They deal (Frazier somewhat more skillfully than Gurganus) in what a North Carolina newspaper editor of my long-ago acquaintance used to call shucks-'n'-nubbins, which is loosely defined as tiny ears of corn. Frazier's corn is anything but tiny — more than 400 pages of it in the case of 'Thirteen Moons' — but it's corn all the same.

Reading Frazier is like sitting by the cracker barrel for hour after hour and listening to an amiable but impossibly gassy guy who talks real slow, says 'I reckon' a whole lot and never shuts up. His novels have little structure and not much in the way of plot; in 'Cold Mountain' he gave us the wounded Confederate soldier, Inman, limping his way back to his gal, Ada, in the North Carolina mountains, and in 'Thirteen Moons' it's the ancient Will Cooper reminiscing about his nine decades and his Cherokee buddies and the gal, Claire, whom he managed to love and lose. He is a far less interesting man than Frazier obviously believes him to be, which is a little surprising because he's based on a very interesting historical figure.

'Will Cooper is not William Holland Thomas,' Frazier says in an author's note, and then coyly adds, 'though they do share some DNA.' Actually, they share a whole lot. William Holland Thomas was born in North Carolina in 1805, was almost immediately orphaned, worked as a boy in a general store in the mountains, taught himself the law, worked to secure the right of the Cherokees to remain in their territory as Andrew Jackson sought to drive all Indians westward, served in the state senate and organized a company of Cherokee soldiers on behalf of the Confederacy. All of which is exactly what Will Cooper does in 'Thirteen Moons'; where fact and fiction part is that Thomas married and had children while Cooper remains single, and Thomas' mental condition gradually deteriorated after the Civil War while Cooper remains alert, if rather tired, to the novel's end.

In other words, in 'Thirteen Moons' Frazier essentially has fictionalized history. Nothing wrong with that: happens all the time. But the novel provides less imagination and invention than readers are likely to expect; it reads more like a dutifully researched (check out that author's note) graduate school paper than a work of fiction. It also is chock-a-block with homespun aphorisms that aren't exactly full of original wisdom: 'One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time,' and 'Grief is a haunting,' and 'Writers can tell any lie that leaps into their heads,' and 'Our worst pain is confined within our own skin,' and 'We are not made strong enough to stand up against endless grief,' and so forth. To be sure Frazier's folksy wisdom is a good deal easier to swallow than Gurganus', but it's folksy all the same and not especially wise.

The novel is narrated in the first person. Early on, Will tells us that 'I was always word-smitten' and that he kept journals for years, though the novel obviously is a reconstruction of the journals rather than the journals themselves. It begins with the 'bound boy' that Will became at the age of 12, when his uncle and aunt sent him off to be 'a shopkeep' for seven years, apprenticed to an elderly gentleman who owned 'a trade post out at the edge of the (Cherokee) Nation.' He makes his way through the mountain forests on his own, encountering adventures similar to those that beset Inman in 'Cold Mountain' — Frazier does like to send his men out on interminable treks that often seem to be headed nowhere — until he finally arrives at the store, which 'was hardly bigger than the parlor room of my aunt's house' and provided with 'woefully little ... stock from the outer world.'

Will is a go-getter, though, and soon enough the store is busy, at least by mountain standards. Will runs it for four years, then is able to buy it after the owner's death. By this point, he has become something of a fixture in the Indian community, especially after he befriends an old Indian named Bear, 'possessor of the deepest and sharpest mind to which I have ever been exposed.' At once the reader is in the presence of the Noble Savage, though a bit later Frazier tries to wriggle out of that one:

'It is tempting to look back at Bear's people from the perspective of this modern world and see them as changeless and pure, authentic people in ways impossible for anybody to be anymore. We need Noble Savages for our own purposes. Our happy imaginings about them and the pure world they occupied do us good when incoherent change overwhelms us. But even in those early days when I was first getting to know Bear and his people, I could see that change and brutal loss had been all they had experienced for two centuries. ... It was not any kind of original people left. No wild Indians at all, and little raw wilderness. They were damaged people, and they lived in a broken world like everybody else.'

True enough, but it's also true that Frazier sentimentalizes the Cherokee even as he tries to keep his distance from the Noble Savage cliche. When Bear offers 'to stand as your father' — i.e., to step in for the father whom Will lost before he was born — it's a true Noble Savage Moment: 'If you were born or adopted into a clan, you were Cherokee. Everybody else was an outsider. So when Bear made his offer it was not only between him and me, it was also a deal with his whole people and thus a matter of identity. For them and for me and for him.' Or, as Annie Oakley puts it in 'Annie Get Your Gun,' 'I'm an Indian Too.'

Corny? Absolutely. It had best be acknowledged, though, that Frazier's sentimental streak is almost certainly what has gotten him to where he is. It comes naturally to him, and readers seem to recognize this. However one may feel about the books that make their way to the upper reaches of the fiction best-seller lists, one thing is true of just about all of them: They are written with the utmost sincerity. Their authors mean what they write. They aren't trying to jerk readers around, and they aren't condescending to them. Readers can sense when they're being patronized, and they rarely fall for it. Whatever else there is to be said about Frazier's fiction — and in my view there's not much — its sincerity is unimpeachable.

Which makes it doubly odd that he tries to have it both ways. In 'Cold Mountain,' after Inman and Ada have their ecstatic and endlessly delayed reunion, Frazier pulls up short by killing Inman off in the closing paragraphs. Something similar (though scarcely as violent) happens between Will and Claire toward the end of 'Thirteen Moons.' Even as Frazier is tugging away at our heartstrings, he's trying to show how tough and realistic he can be, but it feels strained and unpersuasive; my own hunch is that he thinks literary respectability can be earned only if sentimentality is served up with a hard-hearted twist, but it's the sentimentality that's believable, not the twist.

Will readers flock to 'Thirteen Moons' as they did to 'Cold Mountain'? Who knows? Frazier's new publisher has a ton of money invested in him and will be pulling out all the stops. One thing is certain: 'Thirteen Moons' is going to be putting a whole bunch of people to sleep.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at)washpost.com." Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)

Review:

"There are successful scenes along the way, and, as in Cold Mountain, the world of the Appalachian forest primeval is brought to life. But neither of the plot lines is effective, and the problem is Cooper." Louis Menand, The New Yorker

Review:

"It's fertile material — so why is this novel so much less moving than Cold Mountain?...Will's tale is, by turns, amusing, bawdy, bloody, and poignant, but finishing one baggy chapter never leaves you panting for the next. (Grade: B-)" Entertainment Weekly

Review:

"[A] literary journey of magnitude. Whether on a plane, in an office or curled in a window seat, readers who absorb Will's story will find their own lives enriched. Thirteen Moons belongs to the ages." Michael Blake, The Los Angeles Times

Review:

"Thirteen Moons — despite its often somber subject matter — is a considerably airier production [than Cold Mountain]: reminiscent, at times, of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man and a lot closer to Larry McMurtry than to Cormac McCarthy." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Review:

"[W]ithout Cold Mountain's perfect structure, Moons becomes an amiable companion in need of an editor....You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons, but you won't love it like you did Cold Mountain." USA Today

Review:

"One of the great Native American — and American — stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"Unfortunately, for the first fourth of the book, there is too much detail for the plot to easily bear. But, finally, the characters are able to step out from behind this blanket of particulars and incidentals and make the story work." Booklist

Review:

"Frazier's long-awaited second novel ambles off to a slow start, crawls along at a turtle's pace, and reaches its destination after some torturous plotting and doubtful characterization....A tiresome novel." Library Journal

Review:

"Will's (and Frazier's) love for his Cherokee family and the Eden of the Smoky Mountains created the power and beauty of Thirteen Moons' early chapters. Their loss, however, left the novelist and his hero empty and a promising novel adrift." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Review:

"[A] boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition....Frazier draws a massive canvas of historical fiction in Thirteen Moons, remaining true to the heartbreak of a land and its indigenous culture nearly torn asunder." Boston Globe

Synopsis:

At the age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent on a journey through the uncharted wilderness of the Cherokee Nation. Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that ultimately forge Wills character. All the while, his love of Claire, the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful Featherstone, will forever rule Wills heart. In a voice filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion.

“A boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition: It tips its hat to Don Quixote as well as Twain and Melville, and it boldly sets out to capture a broad swatch of Americas story in the mid-nineteenth century.”

-The Boston Globe

“Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details-he has a scholars command of the physical realities of early America and a novelists gift for bringing them to life.”

-Time

“A powerhouse second act . . . a brilliant success.”

-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Compulsively readable . . . a fitting successor to Cold Mountain.”

-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Magical . . . fascinating and moving . . . You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons.”

-USA Today

“Genius.”

-Time

“Mesmerizing . . . a bountiful literary panorama . . . The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narratives true heart.”

-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brimming with vivid, adventurous incident.”

-Raleigh News & Observer

“Reading a Frazier novel is like listening to a fine symphony. . . . Take the time to savor Fraziers work, to take in each thought, to relish the turn of phrase or the imagery of a craftsman.”

About the Author

Charles Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his first novel, was an international bestseller and won the National Book Award in 1997, as well as the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Zangmo, January 5, 2011 (view all comments by Zangmo)
I found this novel very interesting, well written, and nostalgic. It's about desire but somehow as the narrator ages, the desire morphs into an intellectual distance that keeps him from responding to change. I'm still considering the interplay among the narrator's love of books, the use of the 19th century's treatment of the Indians, the narrator's attachment to Indians but without really confronting the dichotomy between Featherstone, the author's image of an Americanized Indian, and Bear, an Indian who tries to keep at least something of the Cherokee past alive. The betrayal of Charley and his family seems to set the narrator on a negative path,at least in regard to keeping up with his responsibilities. But is it even possible for him to keep up the entangled mess of promises/loans etc. that he has woven to try to keep Bear and his tribe together over a period of many years? This is unclear. The narrator does not seem interested in really entering the world of the dispossessed except insofar as he himself feels dispossessed but his dispossession is not cultural in the same way as the dispossession of the Indians although he attempts to make their dispossession his own. A lot to chew over about in this book.

thegreenangel, January 23, 2010 (view all comments by thegreenangel)
If one is expecting the caliber of Frazier's first novel, Cold Mountain, one will be disappointed. Although enjoyable, Thirteen Moons shouldn't be compared to the brilliance of the other novel. So, given that, I would still recommend this as a nice read. Frazier's prose here tends to be overworked and rather than illuminating his scenes, clouds it with too much detail, too much antiquated vocabulary, making what would otherwise be delightful passages feel like drudgery. I felt as if, without the aid of a dictionary, complete comprehension would allude me; thus making me, the reader, feel not only humble, but slighted by the author. I appreciate command and dexterity of language from writers, but when one goes beyond the realm of servicing his novel, his story, for...I don't know...showmanship or language grandiosity, then I have, rather than admiration for such usage, disdain. It makes for incomprehensibility, lack of clarity, and the worst sin of all, it detracts from the flow of the plots so much so that it is more comfortable to either pick up another novel or reach for the remote.

Still and all, it's a good story, reminiscent to me of Dustin Hoffman's self admitted favorite, Little Big Man. If Frazier had visions of a screenplay in mind while conceiving this story, he was on the mark. Perhaps that's why he wrote it the way he did; not really caring if his novel readers would like it, but aiming for Hollywood instead. That's probably more cruel than I wish to be, but after his first success, why not; That's Show Biz. Take it on your next plane trip and it'll serve as a wonderful segueway into conversation with your attractive seatmate, if nothing else.

"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"When Frazier's debut Cold Mountain blossomed into a National Book Award–winning bestseller with four million copies in print, expectations for the follow-up rose almost immediately. A decade later, the good news is that Frazier's storytelling prowess doesn't falter in this sophomore effort, a bountiful literary panorama again set primarily in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. The story takes place mostly before the Civil War this time, and it is epic in scope. With pristine prose that's often wry, Frazier brings a rough-and-tumble pioneer past magnificently to life, indicts America with painful bluntness for the betrayal of its native people and recounts a romance rife with sadness. In a departure from Cold Mountain's Inman, Will Cooper narrates his own story in retrospect, beginning with his days as an orphaned, literate 'bound boy' who is dispatched to run a musty trading post at the edge of the Cherokee Nation. Nearly nine mesmerizing decades later, Will is an eccentric elder of great accomplishments and gargantuan failures, perched cantankerously on his front porch taking potshots at passenger trains rumbling across his property (he owns 'quite a few' shares of the railroad). Over the years, Will — modeled very loosely, Frazier acknowledges, on real-life frontiersman William Holland Thomas — becomes a prosperous merchant, a self-taught lawyer and a state senator; he's adopted by a Cherokee elder and later leads the clan as a white Indian chief; he bears terrible witness to the 1838–1839 Trail of Tears; a quarter-century later, he goes to battle for the Confederacy as a self-anointed colonel, leading a mostly Indian force with a 'legion of lawyers and bookkeepers and shop clerks' as officers; as time passes, his life intersects with such figures as Davy Crockett, Sen. John C. Calhoun and President Andrew Jackson. After the Civil War, Will fritters away a fortune through wanderlust, neglect and unquenched longing for his one true love, Claire, a girl he won in a card game when they were both 12, wooed for two erotic summers in his teen years and found again several decades later. In the novel's wistful coda, recalling Claire's voice inflicts 'flesh wounds of memory, painful but inconclusive' — a voice that an uncertain old Will hears in the static hiss when he answers his newfangled phone in the book's opening pages. The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narrative's true heart." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Review A Day"
by Noah Oppenheim, Esquire,
"Thirteen Moons [is] the best evidence yet that somewhere between one page and 400, a lot can go wrong....Plodding through Thirteen Moons, one admires its scope and verisimilitude. But this tale is meant to be an elegy — both for a woman and an epoch of history. And in the end, you probably won't miss either. You'll mourn only that bygone era when reward and result bore a closer correlation." (read the entire Esquire review)

"Review"
by Louis Menand, The New Yorker,
"There are successful scenes along the way, and, as in Cold Mountain, the world of the Appalachian forest primeval is brought to life. But neither of the plot lines is effective, and the problem is Cooper."

"Review"
by Entertainment Weekly,
"It's fertile material — so why is this novel so much less moving than Cold Mountain?...Will's tale is, by turns, amusing, bawdy, bloody, and poignant, but finishing one baggy chapter never leaves you panting for the next. (Grade: B-)"

"Review"
by Michael Blake, The Los Angeles Times,
"[A] literary journey of magnitude. Whether on a plane, in an office or curled in a window seat, readers who absorb Will's story will find their own lives enriched. Thirteen Moons belongs to the ages."

"Review"
by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times,
"Thirteen Moons — despite its often somber subject matter — is a considerably airier production [than Cold Mountain]: reminiscent, at times, of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man and a lot closer to Larry McMurtry than to Cormac McCarthy."

"Review"
by USA Today,
"[W]ithout Cold Mountain's perfect structure, Moons becomes an amiable companion in need of an editor....You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons, but you won't love it like you did Cold Mountain."

"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"One of the great Native American — and American — stories, and a great gift to all of us, from one of our very best writers."

"Review"
by Booklist,
"Unfortunately, for the first fourth of the book, there is too much detail for the plot to easily bear. But, finally, the characters are able to step out from behind this blanket of particulars and incidentals and make the story work."

"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Frazier's long-awaited second novel ambles off to a slow start, crawls along at a turtle's pace, and reaches its destination after some torturous plotting and doubtful characterization....A tiresome novel."

"Review"
by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
"Will's (and Frazier's) love for his Cherokee family and the Eden of the Smoky Mountains created the power and beauty of Thirteen Moons' early chapters. Their loss, however, left the novelist and his hero empty and a promising novel adrift."

"Review"
by Boston Globe,
"[A] boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition....Frazier draws a massive canvas of historical fiction in Thirteen Moons, remaining true to the heartbreak of a land and its indigenous culture nearly torn asunder."

"Synopsis"
by Random,
At the age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent on a journey through the uncharted wilderness of the Cherokee Nation. Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that ultimately forge Wills character. All the while, his love of Claire, the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful Featherstone, will forever rule Wills heart. In a voice filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion.

“A boisterous, confident novel that draws from the epic tradition: It tips its hat to Don Quixote as well as Twain and Melville, and it boldly sets out to capture a broad swatch of Americas story in the mid-nineteenth century.”

-The Boston Globe

“Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details-he has a scholars command of the physical realities of early America and a novelists gift for bringing them to life.”

-Time

“A powerhouse second act . . . a brilliant success.”

-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Compulsively readable . . . a fitting successor to Cold Mountain.”

-St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Magical . . . fascinating and moving . . . You will find much to admire and savor in Thirteen Moons.”

-USA Today

“Genius.”

-Time

“Mesmerizing . . . a bountiful literary panorama . . . The history that Frazier hauntingly unwinds through Will is as melodic as it is melancholy, but the sublime love story is the narratives true heart.”

-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brimming with vivid, adventurous incident.”

-Raleigh News & Observer

“Reading a Frazier novel is like listening to a fine symphony. . . . Take the time to savor Fraziers work, to take in each thought, to relish the turn of phrase or the imagery of a craftsman.”

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